“Listen, I don’t blame you for wanting closure. That’s fine. I want it, too. But I can’t let you parade around this place like it’s Graceland and Zan’s Elvis. I know you better than that. I know you’re above this stalking business.”
“What do you suggest we do, then?”
“We do what we both know you came here to do. We meet up with Zan. We see if he’s the Zan you remember. The Zan you want to be with.”
I pretend to be engrossed in a piece of art on the wall until I notice the title is
Naked Woman: Distorted.
I look up at Noah. His eyes are so clear I can only stare into them for a minute without getting dizzy.
“Joy.” Noah’s voice is quiet. “Will you promise me one thing?” He lowers his head. “I know you remember Zan a certain way. But if we find Zan and he doesn’t match up with the memories . . . the Zanories”—Noah smiles, tiny—“then let him go, okay? I can’t stand to see you get hurt again.”
KIRCHENDORF
I need to
put one hand over each of my temples and squeeze in as hard as I can. That is what I need to do. It’s the only way to get rid of this feeling. But I can’t. So I sit down instead. I sit down on a paisley-upholstered chair and say: “Whatever.”
Noah swallows, and I can physically see him losing the melodrama of a moment ago. “Let’s still get lunch while we’re here, okay?”
I stand up, slowly. The floor seems solid enough, so I nod. “Yeah, okay.”
We walk up to the front counter and out of nowhere a new crop of students crowds in behind us. I like the misguided feeling that we started a trend. The daily specials, scrawled in pink chalk, are impossible to read.
“I’m asking the next person I talk to if he knows Zan,” says Noah.
“Don’t you dare.” I keep my voice low. “That’s about a hundred times more stalkerish than anything I’ve done this entire trip.”
“It’s about a hundred times more
sensible
than anything you’ve done this entire trip,” Noah says to me. To the shaggy-haired kid behind the counter he says, “I’ll have a four cheese quesadilla, please. You?” Noah nods at me.
I haven’t had a chance to look at the menu. “The daily special.”
The kid looks confused. “Which one?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. The top one.”
“Turkey with avocado on seven grain?”
I nod, and he’s ringing up the total when Noah really does ask, “By the way, do you know Alexander Kirchendorf?”
By the way
? Oh, casually and by the way, do you know some random student? I can’t believe he’s doing this to me.
The shaggy-haired kid behind the counter shakes his head. “Nope.” He pauses. “Hey, Justine?” he yells over the music to a girl filling a blue ceramic mug. “Do you know an Alexander Kirchendorf?”
And it’s like one of those movie moments when everything freezes. There’s a split-second pause while the stereo switches songs, a million conversations lull, and the refrigerator stops humming. It’s dead silent while Justine says: “Wait, Kirchendorf?” She pauses between syllables, making it sound even longer. “Kirchendorf, like German? For church?”
Like German for church. For church. Everything comes back to that, doesn’t it? Back to the church he doesn’t believe in. Back to the church that was so much a part of him it’s still his name.
Then Justine’s standing in front of me, her curly black hair falling out of its sloppy bun, her black eyes looking earnest. She’s holding out a sheet of paper. “I don’t know him,” she says. “But is this the guy you’re looking for?”
There’s a list of names scrawled across the paper. Larger than the rest is one name in familiar handwriting, a crazy-beautiful hybrid of lowercase and caps.
Kirchendorf.
“I’m writing my thesis on the historical significance of surnames,” Justine tells me. My eyes are still drawn to his name, his handwriting. “Your friend’s name popped out at me. In fact, if he’d be up for an interview . . .”
“What’s this list for?” I interrupt her.
She points to the heading, and both Noah and I look closer. “Open-mike poetry reading,” she says. “Tonight.”
Open-mike poetry night. Noah and I share a look. Of course.
Not that Zan read poetry at open-mike night back home. “Bunch of no-talent wannabes,” he said about the poetry club at Haven High. Harsh, but true. “When I give a reading it’ll be with
real
writers.”
Now he’s found them. Tonight at eight o’clock he’ll be with real writers and I’ll be with him.
SLEEPING ON IT
We finish eating,
and once we get outside, the sun is already beginning to peek through the clouds. I can tell Noah’s pleased, but not because of the weather—because he’s the kind of guy who really, really likes to have a plan. “Okay,” he says, checking his phone. “So, we know what we’re doing tonight. What’s next on our agenda?”
I say it before I can think not to. “Sleep?” The Zan hunt’s been more exhausting than I’d anticipated, and the seven-grain sandwich sits heavy in my stomach and fuzzy on my mind.
Everywhere kids are sprawled out studying under trees, and there’s a breeze, and all I want to do is sprawl out, or curl up, anything where I don’t have to think or speak or move. “Let’s go back to Gretel’s.”
Noah nods.
I lead him in a windy detour that will take us back to our car via the Scripps campus. Elm trees dot the lawn, and their pattern reminds me of argyle socks. “Scripps always makes me feel like I’m in an Impressionist painting,” I tell Noah, kicking a golden leaf off the walkway.
“It’s ... prettier here, isn’t it?” he says. It’s unexpected, how he says it, that he says it at all.
I nod. “It’s the prettiest place in the world, as far as I’m concerned.” It’s almost too beautiful. Seeing all the girls walk past me—smart, driven, focused girls with a purpose—it’s more than I can take. That my purpose here is to find my boyfriend has never felt more pathetic.
I spot a nice empty space under a tree just down the road. It’s away from the smart girls, and it’s a place I can rest without being reminded of everything I should be doing: how I should be better than this, how I should have found Zan already, how I shouldn’t even need to be finding him at all. How I should be a competent, confident young woman who doesn’t need a man—and men want her all the more because of it. That’s who I should be. I have to get away from the shoulds.
“Let’s go there,” I say, pointing. “I’m too tired to get all the way to the car without stopping first. Is that okay?”
“Sure it is,” says Noah, surprised. “Whatever you want.”
I take out my denim jacket and spread it over my backpack. Noah sits with his back against the tree’s massive trunk.
“I used to want to go to college here,” I say, resting my head against my jacket/backpack pillow.
“But not anymore?” Noah says.
I close my eyes. The air feels perfect here. At home, it’s already starting to get too cold. “Now I don’t know with . . . everything going on. I don’t know where the right place is for me.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Noah says, and I yawn.
“I hope so.”
ULTIMATE
The next thing
I hear is a voice. A loud one.
“You’ve gotta move, man. We need to practice.”
“Practice playing Frisbee?” I recognize this voice. It’s Noah’s. I can’t bring myself to open my eyes.
“No, not Frisbee.
Ultimate
. It’s the off-season, but we’ve got to stay in shape. And this is where we practice. So wake up your girlfriend and move.” This voice is deeper than the first, but also more annoying.
I know at this point I should fully wake up, open my eyes, and tell these guys to quit making stupid assumptions. That I’m not Noah’s girlfriend, but that if they ask nicely we’ll leave.
Before I can bring myself to move, though, Noah starts talking. Of course. He’ll set the record straight. I’m
not
his girlfriend. We’ll just move. It’s no big deal.
I think I’m asleep still, dreaming, when he says: “Can’t you just let her sleep? We’re not really in your way.” How he says it, though, it sounds like: “You
will
let her sleep, and you
will
leave us the hell alone.” I mean, if a guy like Noah Talbot said things like “leave us the hell alone.”
It’s the first time I’ve heard Noah opt for confrontation. He’s opting for confrontation and he’s opting for it because of me. That’s how I know this is real—my subconscious wouldn’t even know how to make this up. No guy’s ever opted for confrontation because of me before, let alone the calmest guy I’ve ever met. I can’t help that it makes my insides tingle a little.
“The sun’s too bright over here anyway,” the annoying voice says, and I hear two sets of footsteps tromp off.
I yawn, stretch, and then slowly open my eyes. “Hey.” I shift so that I’m sitting next to him.
“Hey,” says Noah, looking over at me. “How’d you sleep?”
I shoot him a thumbs-up. It’s cozy, under the shade tree, relaxing with Noah. Too cozy. My mind is still in a comfortable haze until I all-the-way wake up and realize how wrong everything in my life is.
“Let’s go,” I say, hopping up so quickly that Noah looks startled.
“Okay,” he says. “You still want to go back?” He looks all expectant, eager-to-please, and I know now’s the time I could ask him to go on a tour of every public restroom in the vicinity and he’d do it, no questions asked. That’s just the kind of guy he is, and this is just the moment he’s being himself the most.
But I still want to go home. This day already feels like it’s been eighty hours long. And I need my energy for tonight. When I tell this to Noah, he looks relieved, but all he says is, “Your wish is my command.”
We cross the street to head back to the SAAB, strolling a little because I’m still sort of sleepy and it’s a beautiful day, really. All the buildings glisten. They are at their most beautiful, ready to be photographed for brochures and course catalogues.
“Oh, good, we were just about to start!” A girl comes bounding out of the building we’re passing. She’s an obvious dancer, with long, gangly-tree limbs, good posture, and the kind of wavy hair that falls effortlessly into a messy-but-not-really bun.
She holds one of the glass doors open for us. “I’m glad you guys showed up. It’s always good to have a few ‘real people’ in the audience for dress rehearsal, you know?”
Noah and I exchange a glance, and in that glance we both realize what we’ve been roped into. This is a dance recital, and there’s no way we can leave now without looking like jerks. And we aren’t jerks. Especially not Noah.
“Real people are good,” Noah agrees, nodding. To someone else it would look like a typical nod, but I feel Noah’s resignation to his fate with every bob of his head.
The girl laughs, even though nothing’s funny. “We’re having problems with the lighting,” she says, leading us to a small theater. “Let us know what you think after the performance, okay?’
There’s seating for maybe fifty people, on uncomfortable-looking chairs, mostly occupied by other dance types. The stage is a plain white dance floor, with a remote-controlled car skittering all over it.
“Very postmodern,” Noah says, seriously, as we find seats near the exit.
“Oh, like you have any idea.”
“Whatever. I’m Lord of the Dance.” Noah says this last part in a whisper, raising his eyebrows.
“I happen to know this to be false,” I say. “You’ve told me you don’t like dancing. Twice.”
My knowing this makes him happier, because when he looks at me he smiles. “Wow, you remember. Impressive.”
“Then you’re easily impressed,” I say, smiling back. I shift in my chair, which feels as awkward as it looks. I wonder how long this is going to be.
Just then the lights dim, a single beam illuminating a section of the stage.
“And we’re off,” Noah says.
UNDRESSED REHEARSAL
A dancer walks
onto the stage. She’s not in the leotard/toe shoes getup I expect to see. She’s in ... well, practically nothing. The two pieces she wears are skimpier than short-shorts and a tank top but significantly less hot than a bikini. It’s more like she’s wearing underwear—drab, unflattering underwear.
Overhead, a voice describes the dancer. It booms like the voice of God: Asian-American. One hundred and fifteen pounds. Emotionally fragile.
The girl just stands there, and I think, “Hey, even
I
could do this kind of dance.”
She steps aside, and a male dancer takes the stage. He’s wearing a drab, Speedo-looking thing that blends into his gingerbread-colored skin. If he was more attractive I would look away. He isn’t, so I just stare at him as the narrator calls him: Small-boned. Homosexual. Easily frightened.
More dancers take the stage in various states of near-nakedness, each of them described as they stand, illuminated.
“Um, so, is this the dance?”
Noah whispers into my ear.
“Maybe?”
I whisper back.
“I’m not sure. I’m not really into dance.”
Slowly, colored lights flutter across the stage, casting long, distorted shadows on the wall. So far, the lighting is my favorite part of the show. I make a mental note to tell bun-girl.
Then, the dancing. Bodies contort, flat stomachs moving with labored breath, gangly tree limbs swaying against time with the tuneless music now blaring through the speakers. Some spin while others stand. Others stand while some spin. The bodies are beautiful to watch, I admit—but it’s a tricky thing, watching bodies that are between seventy-six and eighty percent unclothed.
Especially while sitting next to the angelic Noah Talbot, who’s slumping in his seat uncomfortably. I’d have more fun watching him squirm if I wasn’t enjoying myself so little. The dancers seem to be in pain, and I flinch with each gasp they take, so I move my stare to the walls. The shadows flit and sway like my thoughts, jumping from one idea to another, bending before I can finish thinking them through.